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Literary & Medical Historian | DSM Examiner | Yale Press Author
Christopher Lane investigates how modern institutions define normal behavior, belief, and doubt.
His prize-winning study Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007) exposed the controversy over major changes to American psychiatry’s diagnostic manual in the 1980s and 90s, including how guesswork and faulty science, loose criteria and undisclosed conflicts of interest led to skyrocketing rates of social anxiety disorder and the creation of six other anxiety disorders that we use today for insurance billing. Translated into six languages, based on exhaustive archival research and in-depth interviews, Shyness was highly commended by the British Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. The New York Times called it “well-researched” and Publishers Weekly a “scathing indictment of the American Psychiatric Association and the psychopharmacological industry.”
Lane’s Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2017) uncovered how Peale’s “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s actively turned belief in God into a precondition for national and individual mental health. Criticized as “heretical” in 1960 for blending Christian theology with positive psychology, Peale published a bestseller in 1952 that fueled a surge in religiosity and religious nationalism — the book briefly outsold the Bible in America, redefined conservatism in the Oval Office, and helped set the stage for today’s culture wars. The Washington Post called Lane's study "enthralling … graceful and well-paced … requisite reading,” and the History journal, "Well-timed and well-written," because it "argues that domestic and global politics infused Peale’s work."
Lane’s earlier work on the roots of freethought and unbelief, The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011), studied how agnosticism, doubt, and skepticism entered public life in the late nineteenth century, as leading intellectuals battled the Church and redefined doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity. According to the New York Times, the book “argued that the explosion of questioning in the Victorian era transformed the idea of doubt from a sin or lapse to necessary exploration."
Across eight books, Lane examines the history of medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and religion. A former Guggenheim fellow and Northwestern University professor, he is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, TIME, and Chronicle Review.
Readers interested in the DSM-III controversy, the overdiagnosis of mental illness, Norman Vincent Peale’s influence and legacy, and the history of religious doubt can ask the author questions on Goodreads.
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